Imprisoned SLA member hopes for Ill. release

March 20, 2009

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- This week's release of Sara Jane Olson to her adopted home state of Minnesota leaves one last member of the violent 1970s-era Symbionese Liberation Army still in prison, serving out the final months of his California sentence.

James William Kilgore, the last remaining SLA member still in prison, is set to be released in May and has asked authorities to let him serve his year of parole in Illinois.

Kilgore managed to elude authorities the longest of any of his former radical comrades, who made headlines with their kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, the murder of an Oakland school official and numerous bank robberies.

Kilgore stayed underground for nearly three decades before being arrested in 2002 in Cape Town, South Africa.

Like Olson -- his former girlfriend who was unmasked three years earlier -- the aging former radical had built a prosperous new life during his decades on the run.

While Olson spent 24 years as a doctor's wife raising three daughters, Kilgore became a University of Cape Town professor, writing one of South Africa's most popular high school history books, "Making History," under his alias of Charles William Pape.

And like Olson, who returned to St. Paul on Tuesday after serving a seven-year sentence, Kilgore wants to rejoin his family in the Midwest.

Kilgore is asking that he be allowed to serve his year of parole in Illinois, though state prison officials have not decided whether to grant the request.

"He's going to live in the States. His family has moved here," said attorney Louis Freeman of New York City, who represented Kilgore after his arrest and remains in contact with his former client.

Kilgore, now 61, had married an American woman while living in South Africa. His wife teaches at a university, and his two sons have grown up while he's been in prison; one is in college, the other in high school.

He is set to be released from High Desert State Prison at Susanville in May after completing a six-year sentence for the killing of suburban Sacramento housewife Myrna Opsahl during an April 1975 bank robbery.

The state sentence is on top of a 54-month federal prison sentence for using the birth certificate of a dead baby to obtain a passport in Seattle and for possession of a pipe bomb that federal authorities said they found in his Daly City, Calif., apartment in 1975.